


stuck with the same kind of people

by sunsmasher



Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/M, Getting Rekt, Getting Together, Post-Canon, getting beat up, the curse of the traveller's vault: noncon interstellar travelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 05:34:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5079760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhys is out and away first, ducking between the troll's legs, and when the thing makes a belated grab for him, it catches Fiona instead. She screams as it closes its cut-glass fingers around her, lifting her some six feet off the ground to get a better look. It feels like her lungs are being sieved out her ribs, and Rhys bolts back toward her.</p>
<p>“It only has three buttons!” she realizes he is shouting. “One of them is the locator beacon! How did you even get it to record audio?”</p>
<p>“Oh my god, Rhys! Fuck off and help me!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	stuck with the same kind of people

Fiona is so goddamn certain the giant crystal troll monsters shouldn’t be this fast. She dodges one hulking hand, then another, darting between the spindly iron trees that dot this planet’s surface, and sees Rhys come galloping over the rise.

“Where have you _been_?” she roars, ducking behind a bush apparently made of diamonds. When the delightfully sparkly rock troll’s fists come smashing down an inch from her hand, it’s the diamonds that shatter.

“I told you to send me your coordinates if you needed backup!” Rhys shouts back, over all the crashing and his own intermittent screaming. Fiona darts around the troll’s back, which gets her close enough for Rhys to grab her by the elbow and drag her into a crevice that she totally did not see before in the cliff face they’ve been backed up against (so maybe the EchoEye has some survival uses, fine!) Rhys smacks his head against the violently yellow rock as they dive in, the atrocious beanpole, and Fiona chooses to add to this injury by gut-punching him as soon as he’s standing.

“I _did_ send you the coordinates!” she snarls as Rhys makes entertaining wheezing noises. The troll has taken to idly pummeling the cliff face, looming gleamingly outside their little hidey-hole.

“ _You—_ ” Rhys gasps, straightening. “You sent me a gigabyte of corrupted text that I’m pretty sure to be an _mp3!_ I nearly burned out my eye trying to open it, how did you even _do that_ from a comscreen?”

Their hidey-hole is getting noticeably more fractured as the troll keeps up its beating. The falling rock kinda smells like raw meat, which is terrible.

“It—it had too many buttons!” Fiona says, and then she says “Oh shit, _run!”_ because look, now everything is collapsing.

Rhys is out and away first, ducking between the troll’s legs, and when the thing makes a belated grab for him, it catches Fiona instead. She screams as it closes its cut-glass fingers around her, lifting her some six feet off the ground to get a better look. It feels like her lungs are being sieved out her ribs, and Rhys bolts back toward her.

“It only has three buttons!” she realizes he is shouting. “One of them is the locator beacon! How did you even get it to record audio?”

“Oh my god, Rhys! Fuck off and _help me!”_

“Right, right!” he says, because he _totally forgot that Fiona was actively dying_ , _how has she put up with this for six months_ and whips out the stun baton he jury-rigged three warps back.

“Eat amperes, fiend!” he shouts, and jabs the business end of the baton into the troll’s hip. Fiona gets about three seconds of breathing while the troll is distracted by the baton’s buzzing noise, and then it goes right back to crushing her puny flesh body with apparent delight. Rhys, entirely ignored, looks a bit put out.

Fiona is composed entirely of wheezing rage and the sounds of her own ruptured spleen

“I’ll just… I’ll just try something else, yeah?” Rhys calls up to her, and Fiona has just enough breath in her to scream. She kicks furiously at the troll’s forearm as Rhys takes up some stupid fucking—oh my god is he trying to _stab it???_ _is he trying to stab the impenetrable diamond rockmonster???_ oh my god Fiona is going to die in this thing’s terrible, reflective fist.

She glances one heel off the thing’s elbow with enough force to feel it up her thigh, and the troll’s arm shudders. Fiona’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Rhys! Rhys hit the the pointy thing on its elbow! The pointy bit!”

“The whu—“ Rhys’ stupid question is lost to the winds as the troll, evidently growing tired of her stupid beanpole companion’s stupid stun baton fencing maneuvers, pivots. Its free arm smashes into him, sending both beanpole and baton tumbling back. Rhys is back on his feet in an instant, despite the blood now pouring from his nose and mouth, but fuck knows where the baton got to. Fiona prays for a back-up weapon.

One thick rocky fingertip, positioned just over Fiona’s diaphragm, shifts, and there’s a _crack_. The pain is just astronomical.

Rhys raises his robotic hand as he dodges yet again, the troll now firmly interested in crushing Fiona and him both. Rhys’ thumb comes up like a try-hard flagpole, unfamiliar light blooming off his pointer finger as his hand makes the shape of a gun. Fiona stares in horror. This can’t be what he was working on all night by the fire, with the sparking and the swearing and the spools of salvaged wire. It just can’t be.

It is, and the laser-bullet of Rhys’ new cybernetic finger gun ricochets off the troll’s shiny surface at exactly the speed of light, burning a hole dead through Fiona’s hat.

“I hate you!” she screams. “Rhys, _I hate you!”_

“Sorry!” he calls over her frothing rage and the troll’s rumbling avalanche of a growl. He’s got a panel open on his forearm, futzing with some LED displays as he dives around another grab. “I’ll get it in a second, just let me—“

“Just punch it! The elbow thing! _Punch it!”_

Rhys stares at her in disbelief, which almost gets him another knock around the head. He bolts around to the thing’s other side, instead, making Fiona crane her neck to follow him, and shouts “Seriously? How is that any better?”

Another crack in Fiona’s chest. “ _Rhys!”_

“Fine, fine, but this is your fault!” he shouts, and throws his pale flesh fist at the troll’s elbow. For once, the sick shattering noise comes from outside Fiona’s body, and she shrieks.

“Your other arm, you _stupid jackass!_ Use your _OTHER ARM.”_

Rhys, whose face is so white he must have bit through his tongue to keep from screaming, doesn’t say anything— just stops, inhales, and pulls back his right arm until it cocks. The troll swings toward him, Fiona dangling like a toy in its grip, and Rhys smashes into the same little opaque node of crystal on its elbow that Fiona had slammed her foot against.

The effect is damned spectacular. The little valley they’ve been fighting in rings like the inside of a bell as the troll freezes, its tectonic shuddering rattling up Fiona’s bones and into her teeth. Hairline cracks burst out from the point of impact, the bell sound deepening as the fractures widen, and then, having rendered Fiona and Rhys near-blind from the ensuing lightshow, near-deaf from the ongoing ringing, and as bloodied as they’ve ever been, the crystalline monster explodes. Fiona drops like a rock.

“Whuzzuh,” she says, after a few dazed moments of being alive and breathing. She’s on her back in a pile of diamond dust, and the alien sky overhead is a really rather pleasant green. Rhys, off to her side, makes some despairing noises.

“Why does everything always want to kill us?” he asks, as Fiona exults, with deep agony, in her own lung capacity.

“Because we deserve it,” she wheezes.

“Hey, I don’t know about you, but—“

“ _Unghhhhhh_ ,” says Fiona, which is not what she had meant to say (she had meant to say words), but produces the intended effect of making Rhys shut up and laugh.

He appears over her after a moment, silhouetted by the planet’s plentiful daytime stars and smiling faintly. His face is a swelling purple mess, blood splashed down his chin and throat, and he can’t possibly be in as much pain as Fiona is, but she thinks, generously, that it might be close.

“Help me up,” she says, although he’s already holding out a hand, and he grabs her bicep to haul her standing.

The hug that ensues isn’t so much a hug as a mutual moment of forgetfulness as to how legs work. Rhys lists forward, blinking strangely, and when Fiona reaches out to catch him he ends up with an arm around her in turn, metal palm spread over her lower back when her knees start to fail.

“Damn… traitor joints,” she mutters, and he chuckles wetly. Not like, from tears wetly. It’s still the blood.

The day-stars are shining brightly, nigh-on pleasantly, and the troll remains they’re covered in sparkle merrily in return. Fiona doesn’t realize she’s closed her eyes until she opens them again and is momentarily blinded by the sheen off the ground. She could do without it, honestly, everything up to including her eyes is hurting madly, and also Rhys is totally crying in her hair.

“Are you crying in my hair?” she asks after a moment.

“No,” says Rhys, muffled by her hair. And the crying.

Fiona almost feels the infrequent and generally disquieting sensation of compassion-not-directed-at-Sasha, until Rhys continues, “I was really scared that thing would eat me.”

Fiona’s lip curls. She’s still got her forehead pressed to Rhys’ nasty blood-splattered collar bones, but this is irrelevant. “That thing broke half my goddamn ribcage while it had me up there, and you were afraid it would eat _you_?”

Rhys’ vest, grown absolutely filthy in the six months they’ve been galaxy-hopping since opening the Traveller’s chest, drags up and down against her eyebrows. Possibly he’s shrugging. “I mean, you’re kind of making me sound like a dick here— feels like the phrasing’s kinda unnecessary, considering how broken my hand is, but yeah, sure. I was… really, really afraid it would eat me. That seems reasonable, honestly.”

Fiona snorts, one hand drifting up to latch onto Rhys’ metal elbow, where it’s bent to wrap around her waist. Why is he so tall, honestly. She should be taller. That seems more equitable.

“Can’t believe you built finger guns you can’t aim,” she tells Rhys’ gnarly vest. Rhys’ gnarly vest hunches in defensively.

“Okay, look, they’re gonna work great on things that aren’t made of crystal. The monsterman was cheating, crystal isn’t supposed to walk around and break your cheekbones.”

“That would be how it’s supposed to go,” Fiona says, then sighs. “Let’s go back to camp, I want painkillers.”

There’s a sudden silence.

“I—“ Rhys starts, “I think that’s a good idea. Great idea, even. As soon as you let go of my butt.”

Fiona’s eyes blink open again (when do they keep closing?), and she discovers that yeah, her free hand is totally on Rhys’ ass. Wonder how that happened. She squeezes experimentally, which makes some high-pitched squeaking noises happen above her head.

“…That would imply you have a butt,” she tries, after a few tense moments. Honestly, she’s not really sure how to deal this. She would have appreciated a briefing beforehand.

“What?” Rhys manages, still squeaking.

“I mean, like, you don’t have a butt,” Fiona explains, still feeling about. “This is concave. I think I can feel your tailbone.”

“Fiona…”

“Yes.” He’s getting pretty tense now, in the butt region.

“Could you—could you continue that some other time? This is hard enough as it is.”

Fiona pulls back an inch, and looks up. Rhys is curving down around her, lips parted, watching her with really more emotion than is flattering.

She freezes. She had assumed Sasha, or Vaughn, or, hell, his relationship with Handsome Jack could not possibly have been as platonic as she’d’ve liked, but he’s watching her mouth as she breathes. His hand, still the robotic one, shifts against her back. This is happening, and she has to react to it. She must.

She stalls wildly. “Oh,” she manages. Rhys sways a bit, still light-headed, and ends up closer to her than he started.

“Yeah,” he says. Fiona is not the only one stalling.

“Your—your butt is hard enough…”

Rhys’ expression is genuinely pained. “Please stop.”

“Okay,” she says, and presses her lips to his before anything stupider can happen. His mouth is still bloody from the blow to his face, and he’s a terrible kisser. When Fiona pushes harder against him, one hand coming up to cup his jaw, he makes a pained noise. Right, the cheekbone. She goes gentler.

When they break apart, she’s breathing harder than him, but only because her thoracic cavity is a ruin. Rhys is looking at her way the way he looked at her when they opened the Traveller’s treasure. She hadn’t realized then that it meant… all this. The way he swirled his tongue around her mouth like he trying to pick lettuce bits out her teeth, and, maybe more generously, the hesitant pressure of his flesh-and-blood hand just under her jaw.

Of course, she could have been right the first time. Maybe the expression Rhys’ got on his face, open and smiling, has just come to include tongue-shenanigans and a hand against her cheek in recent days. She’s not sure which thought she prefers.

“Vaughn?” she asks, when she’s done being a loon.

He shrugs with an almost-convincing nonchalance. “Not for a long time.”

“Jack?”

His eyes go wide and his lips very tight. “Mmmmmmm _mmmmm_!” he says, sounding like a tornado siren.

“How about Loaderbot.”

“Okay, thank you, very funny.”

She grins. “I know it when I see it. Sasha?”

He finally breaks eye contact, shifting uncomfortably. “I like Sasha a lot. Haven’t seen her in a while, though.”

Fiona stares. “I’m sorry, did I hear that right? Out of sight, out of mind? Is that what happened with you and Vaughn, he turned his back for half an hour and suddenly you had a dick-on for my baby sister?”

“No!” Rhys starts, visibly appalled with himself, appalled with this conversation, appalled with his choices. “Noooooo, no no no, I just meant— I just meant that your sister is great! A paragon of humanity, couldn’t wish her greater success. In all her endeavors! Many happy returns, Sasha!”

Fiona continues staring, as it seems to be having considerable effect.

“She’s just…not who I’ve spent six months intermittently warping across the galaxy with,” Rhys says, at length. Fiona turns down the scary eyes a bit, considering the effort he’s making on this one. Her hand resumes its position at the side of his neck. “If it had been her and not you, then— yeah, maybe. But my feelings for her don’t have anything to do with my feelings for you.”

“Yeah, that one’s not gonna fly,” Fiona hums. Rhys winces. “But I’m a very giving Vault Hunter, so we’ll come back to that later. Wanna have sex?”

The stars are shining, the iron-trees are clanking, and Rhys looks like the local cluster has opened up just for him, and most definitely in his pants.

“Yes,” he says, in a breathless rush. “As soon as we find the painkillers.”

“And maybe a nap.”

“Definitely. Definitely. Painkillers and a nap.”

“And then you’re going to eat me out.”

“Definitely. Yeah. Definitely.”

“Wonderful,” Fiona says, and turns them back around to face the metal beeches. “It’s a date. Now where the hell is camp.”

Rhys leads them off in a direction that Fiona is 87% is dead wrong, insisting that his EchoEye knows the way even if they don’t. Fiona thinks this is bullshit, because the EchoEye (ever since they left range of Atlas and Hyperion) is bullshit, and lo she is proven entirely right when they walk into a caustic lake twenty minutes later. It’s not too bad, though. They make it to land before their boots can get too singed, and Rhys finally admits that the EchoEye’s GPS is a non-starter while travelling, and then they very carefully make out a bit against a rock. Fiona is, upon evaluation, excited to see what wonders a mouthful of painkillers and a nap may bring.

**Author's Note:**

> Title's from What's Real by WATERS, I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com)!


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